


Where You Don't See Me

by melissfiction



Category: Solar Opposites
Genre: Abusive Relationships, M/M, One Shot, Past Abuse, Slut Shaming, Terry is a people pleaser, song inspired fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25505782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melissfiction/pseuds/melissfiction
Summary: He was at Terry’s dorm because it has often been said that what we value can be determined only by what we sacrifice and to consider how this statement applies to a character from a novel or a play and select a character that has deliberately been sacrificed, surrendered, or forfeited something in a way that highlights the character’s values then put together a well-organized presentation in which they analyzed how a particular sacrifice illuminates the character’s values and provides a deeper meaning of the work as a whole. Nothing more, nothing less.
Relationships: Korvotron "Korvo"/Terry (Solar Opposites)
Kudos: 20





	Where You Don't See Me

**Author's Note:**

> “I don’t need the world to see  
> That I’ve been the best I can be  
> But I don’t think I can stand to be  
> Where you don’t see me”

They met, a longer time ago than when they were assigned as evacuation partners, when they were in the same literature class. It was Korvo’s first shiny new year at the academy but Terry’s second year. It was a Category III GE Terry was retaking because last time he tried taking it, the professor dropped him from the class because he ditched the first day. Terry didn’t notice until Week 5 that he never got any assignment notifications from the class. Of course, Terry didn’t remember any of this. If Terry could recall half the classes he took, that was already an accomplishment, let alone the material of those classes. 

Korvo remembered pacing around the study room he reserved for them: circular windows like glowing eyes peering out of the library, obsolete dry erase markers that gave students the false hope of convenience, and a slight fluorescent flicker just outside the glass walls. He only booked an hour, but that was supposed to be enough. Their professor had just assigned the project earlier that day and it wasn’t due until two weeks later. He even asked Terry if it was enough time, and he said, “Yeah, no, totally for sure.” 

30 minutes in, Korvo was still pacing. He hadn’t even looked at the prompt. 

58 minute in, Korvo called it quits. He packed up. And while he was at it, he chucked the dead markers into the Type 19.4 recycling slot. No one had to yank those marker caps off only to realize the ink was dried out, anymore. 

He pressed the down button for the elevator (more than once, because what if he didn’t hit it right the first time?) and checked his text messages while he waited for the gleeful  _ ding _ . No notifications, no apologies, no excuses, but one email about a grassroots campaign’s exclusive offer. The doors slid open—a line in the middle widening like a vertical mouth, revealing the contents between its teeth. Terry was inside, leaning against the railings. He was focused at some random point on the mirror ceilings, then finally met Korvo’s stare. 

“Hey. Korvotron, right?” He put a natural emphasis on his T’s, like specks of water sizzling in hot oil. He gave an unashamed, easy smile as greeting. 

Korvo stepped into the orange light of the enclosure. The doors shut behind him. “You’re late,” he informed Terry. It felt like he was handing back a graded exam with a bright red F circled atop. “Our time slot’s already over.” 

“Oh! That’s fine!” Terry assured him, as if the problem was where to study and not his tardiness. “Let’s just head back to my dorm.” He pressed the button for the ground floor. (Only once. You couldn’t doubt what you didn’t think of.) 

This particular elevator always jolted before descending. Korvo braced himself, but it never came. How lucky. On the way down, he stared at the V of green skin exposed on Terry’s chest. It was going to bother him the entire time if he didn’t fix it. He stepped into Terry’s pocket of territory, claimed by the wide triangle of space claimed in his hands holding onto the railing behind him. “Button your robe,” Korvo demanded, even though he was already on it. 

“Ugh. We’re not even in class.” But Terry didn’t rip open the button like he usually would once it’s buttoned for him. He usually only had this conversation with his professors. “I look cooler that way.” 

“Conformity  _ is _ cool.” 

Terry had the rare opportunity to argue against that, this time, without obedient echoes of that phrase drowning out his thoughts. “Well, I’m trying to conform my mound onto as many mounds as possible, so…” 

That was when Korvo realized that the Terry he was assigned a group project with was  _ Teasin’ Terry.  _ Sometimes also known as Thirsty Terry, and a lot of professors simply know him as Tardy Terry, but he was mostly referred to as the stupidest slut in the entire academy. Korvo hated it. He could have taken the stairs, never texted Terry again, completed the project all by himself, but no, he just  _ had  _ to take the elevator. He didn’t understand why Terry had bothered showing up at all if he was going to be an hour late to an hour-long study session.

They walked towards the dorms. All lowerclassmen were required to live on campus. Few upperclassmen chose to stay because the rent was too egregious for the majority to make that decision. Beyond the arch of the Science Library they had just left was Xesa Court, where apparently they both resided. Near the social science plaza were the Middle Shlorp dorms. The only useful difference between them were the dining halls closest to them. 

Xesa Court was a collection of two-story houses with meaningless names based on the former names of planets Shlorp terraformed: Cuerna, Arpa, Bajo, Flauta, and more that Korvo never bothered memorizing the names of. It wasn’t as if Shlorp respected the culture of those planets, they were just resource pits. Tour guides gave the administration-approved explanation for why the houses were so short, that it was to promote a smaller, tighter community. Message boards told Korvo that it was to discourage finals week suicide jumpers. 

Korvo lived in Vibráfono. Apparently, so did Terry, but on the second floor, Room 205B. 

Terry ripped open his robe as soon as they reached the cozy comfort of his room. Cozy meaning  _ cramped.  _ All the rooms were like that, but Terry’s had drum pads, drum sticks, a music stand, two black cases with some unknown instruments inside, a laundry basket, untouched textbooks already grayed over with dust, and crumpled up pieces of notebook paper. 

Korvo averted his eyes from all of it. He felt embarrassed at the sight of such intimate details. He knew too much, already. He had already been thinking of all the stories he overheard in the dining hall from Terry’s past bedmates. And now Korvo knew Terry was a musician, that he didn’t fold his clothes when they came out of the dryer, and that he had no regard for cleanliness whatsoever. He didn’t want to add Terry’s exposed body to that list. 

“You can look, if you want,” Terry offered. It was no difference to him, considering they would eventually shower together at the same time. He rummaged through his wardrobe. 

“No.” 

Terry remembered, now, that all his dirty clothes were in the wardrobe and all his clean clothes were in his laundry basket. He bent over to pick one out. There was one specific robe he was trying to avoid that had a hole in the sleeve. Oh, he hated that robe, but he couldn’t find it in him to throw it away. 

Korvo took a small peek, then immediately retreated behind the dark barrier of his hands. (He swore he saw a dark purple ink blot of a bruise on Terry’s hip, but it was too quick of a glimpse to be sure.) “Why are you even changing?” 

Finally, Terry pulled a robe over his shoulders and slipped his arms through the sleeves. He got to work on buttoning it up, but left the top one open. “We’ve got so many robes! I change like, five times a day. I wish we could wear different colors, or something. Wouldn’t that be cool? Wait, _ don’t  _ say—”

“—Conformity  _ is  _ cool.” 

“Dammit.” Terry cleared off a space on his desk between the scattered sheet music, drum sticks, and bottles of lube. (There were so many varieties. Some came in different scents!) He pulled out the chair and patted it invitingly. “You can sit here. I do all my work in bed.” 

“Oh, I bet you do.” Korvo sat down and took his laptop out. The window with the PDF explaining their project was still open. He pressed a key, which projected two magenta holographic screens on either side of the laptop’s physical screen. He dragged the PDF to the left screen and opened up a new document on Shlorgle Docs in the middle one. 

Terry let out an awkward chuckle. “So you’ve heard,” he assumed, as if the multiple bottles of lube and the flagrant way he wore his robe and telling Korvo it was okay to look at his naked body weren’t enough of a hint. He sat cross-legged in his bed. “It’s not like I try to sleep around—well actually, I do, but like, the biggest thing is that I can’t say no. It’s so hard! I just, I don’t know, I get so flattered. I don’t wanna hurt their feelings.” 

Huh. Maybe Terry was a conformist, after all. Cool.  _ Except Korvo didn’t ask.  _ He had no clue why Terry was telling him all of this but he was Alice in Wonderland following the White Rabbit down the rabbithole. “So if I asked you to rub mounds with me, you’d say yes?” 

Without a second thought, Terry answered, “Sure!” 

Korvo was glad he was able to say it for the both of them: “No.” 

“Are you sure? It’s your choice. I didn’t somehow guilt trip you into saying no, right?” 

“That’s literally,” and Korvo seldom used that word because it was too often misused, “ _ not  _ how it works.” He was at Terry’s dorm because it has often been said that what we value can be determined only by what we sacrifice and to consider how this statement applies to a character from a novel or a play and select a character that has deliberately been sacrificed, surrendered, or forfeited something in a way that highlights the character’s values then put together a well-organized presentation in which they analyzed how a particular sacrifice illuminates the character’s values and provides a deeper meaning of the work as a whole. Nothing more, nothing less. He was probably, definitely, absolutely going to delete Terry’s number from his contacts as soon as the project was turned in. Maybe block him, too, for good measure. “Have you read anything on the list, yet?” Perhaps a better question was if Terry had ever read a book at all. 

“Reading is dumb!” Terry scoffed. Korvo expected as much. “Plays are meant to be performed! Or maybe adapted into a movie. I’ve watched like five on the list. My favorite one has to be ‘Twins In Paradise’ for sure.” 

Bubbles of giddiness rose in Terry’s chest when he spotted Korvo’s first smile, weaky turned upwards like the muscles were atrophied. He felt like he was winning at some make-believe game with arbitrary points and unrealistic currency. He was sure of it from how Korvo had just angled himself towards Terry, the micromillimeters leaned forward, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dilation in those dark pupils. Terry could bathe for hours in that sudden limelight of interest. In that moment, he felt seen. 

In a briefer moment, he realized how  _ easy  _ it was to get that gaze he craved from Korvo. How different it was. A flick of the light switch. He didn’t need to lay himself bare, no need to be pried open and torn apart. They were just talking about something Korvo liked and that was enough. 

“I haven’t read that one, yet,” Korvo admitted. “What’s it about?” 

“I don’t wanna spoil it.” 

“You don’t have to spoil it. Just tell me the basic premise.” 

“The premise is a spoiler, though! It’s foreshadowing!” 

“Well, now you’ve spoiled that it’s foreshadowing.” 

Terry’s phone, at the bottom of the bed in a clearing between snack wrappers, rang and buzzed. The contact name “DO NOT ANSWER” slid across the top of the screen. Terry just stared at it, like that was enough to pick up the call. 

“Uh. Someone’s calling you.” Korvo hated Terry’s ringtone. He didn’t understand the point of ringtones when he believed that all phones should be set to silent at all times. 

“I’m… I....” Terry sputtered. He grabbed the pillow from behind him and hugged it. “I’m not going to answer it.” 

“Okay.” It was none of Korvo’s business besides that it was interrupting their academic discussion. “Just put it on silent.” 

“But what if someone needs me and I miss it?” Terry argued, as if someone  _ hadn’t  _ just called him and he intentionally didn’t pick up. His eyes were glued to the lock screen wallpaper of him and someone else (Korvo couldn’t make out the face, Terry’s head was blocking it) holding hands and kissing on a hill, which began lighting up with a new message notification from the same contact “ _ Can I call you? _ ”, as if the protocol for asking permission was to do it,  _ then  _ ask. 

“Don’t think about it,” Korvo advised, but he could already see that Terry, who hugged his pillow tighter to himself while burying the lower half of his face in it, was incapable of that. Fuck it. Korvo was already in too deep. He took the bait. “Is there a reason you’re avoiding that call?” 

Terry was eager to over-share. “I can’t say no. Even if I hate it.” 

Korvo sighed. He stood up from the chair, reached for Terry’s phone, flicked the tiny switch on the side to silent mode, and then placed the phone back on Terry’s bed face down. “There. Better?” There were no more lurking shadow-monsters to be afraid of, anymore. 

Terry nodded. His knuckle-aching grip on the pillow loosened. 

“Now tell me what ‘Twins in Paradise’ is about.” Korvo looked away for one second to type in a note that they had chosen Twins in Paradise as their play, and in the next second, Terry had succumbed to dialing DO NOT ANSWER’s phone number. 

“Hey,” Terry greeted, and his smile was ashamed and forced, even though the only one who could see it was Korvo. And Korvo wished he didn’t have to see that mournful curl of his lips. “I’m working on a project right now.” Korvo knew that was an excuse, not an answer to what he’s doing. “I don’t know. I—yeah, I know, but last time was...” Terry suddenly met Korvo’s stare. “No,” he finally told DO NOT ANSWER. He blinked, surprised by the sudden resolution. Korvo could hear DO NOT ANSWER’s voice rise in a storm of frustration before being interrupted by a relieving  _ beep _ of the End Call button being pressed. (Multiple times, frantically.) He turned off his phone, smothered his pillow on top of it, and returned to the safe beacon of Korvo’s gaze. 

Korvo wanted to ask who hurt him, who would ever dare hurt someone who opened themselves up so shamelessly, but that meant crossing a boundary. That meant admitting that he wanted to heal him. They hadn’t even crossed the boundary of discussing the assignment prompt. “It’s alright if you spoil it. I’m gonna read it, anyway.” 

“How can you enjoy something that’s spoiled?” 

“Spoiling something doesn’t mean it’s ruined.” 

“Nuh-uh, it’s totally ruined.” 

“It could only be ‘ruined’ if it was written by your abusive boyfriend.”  _ FuckwhydidIsaythat. _

“He  _ loves _ me!” Terry flinched at his own volume. He quickly lowered his voice, or else the RA would come knocking at his door, but his voice was cracking. “That’s  _ all  _ I want from this stupid fucking disposable planet. I don’t care what comes with it, I don’t care what I have to sacrifice. I just want to die knowing that I was worth something to someone.” 

There was no time to argue with him because shortly after the slap of silence, there was a banging on the door. (Terry had told DO NOT ANSWER no and he was still insistent on bothering him?) Korvo took that as his cue to exit. He packed his laptop back into his satchel and walked out on Terry. He didn’t bother to take a look at DO NOT ANSWER’s face on his way out—none of it was any of his business and it never would be. 

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Korvo heard Terry say to DO NOT ANSWER over his heavy footsteps fading down the hall, “I love you. I missed you. You won’t leave me, right? I know you didn’t mean it last time, I’m sorry, I was just stupid. You were right. You promise you won’t leave me? I don’t know what I’d do without you. I-I love you  _ so _ much, I’m so sorry. I was just fucking stupid.”

He stormed into his room, 110G, and immediately got to work on the so-called “group” project. First of all, he looked up the Shlorpipedia article on Twins in Paradise and finally spoiled the damn play himself. He didn’t even have to read the screenplay to know what he wanted to focus the presentation on. He wrote a rough outline for the presentation: 

_ Darcy’s demonic blood sacrifice to resurrect an illusory version of her mother in the portal was stupid as fuck. Sure, she got what she wanted—her dead mother’s love—but who the fuck cares about love if it’s fake? The real love she needed was in her twin sister, Marcy, who sacrificed countless hours preparing for the tennis championship only for her efforts to be for naught when Darcy’s overdose on the day of the championship made them forfeit. Marcy knew what was best for the both of them. By the time they realize what they needed was each other, it’s too fucking late because that’s when nuclear warfare blew up the world. They wasted so much fucking time sacrificing bullshit for fake love and approval. I don’t get it. Why the fuck couldn’t they see that sacrifice is, by definition, a waste? Why did they have to wait until the goddamn rapture to love each other? I don’t fucking get it! I don’t even want to get it because it’s so stupid! FUCK THIS PLAY.  _

After some polishing and talk of chess piece symbolism, they got an A. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Twins in Paradise" is a reference to an animation by vewn that I watch pretty much every day now. More recently I've been listening to Mitski's song "Francis Forever" on loop. The project prompt from the fic was literally just the first essay prompt I found when I looked up AP Literature essay prompts. 
> 
> The academy's campus is based off of UC Irvine because I'm lazy. "Xesa Court" is Mesa Court and the house names are just random Spanish words. In Xesa Court, I based the previously terraformed planet names off of the Spanish names of different instruments. Korvo and Terry live in Vibraphone lol. 
> 
> On an unrelated note, the Solar Opposites fanfic archive on here is so tiny! I hope I can help fill it.
> 
> Also in case you were wondering "wait why did Terry want to have sex with Korvo if he was already in a relationship?" Terry is a rampant cheater and it's not until he meets Terri that he actually gets his shit together and learns what it's like to be in a secure, healthy relationship. And that's why he's a lot happier by the time he finally meets Korvo for the "real" first time when they're assigned as evacuation partners.


End file.
